Until now, a practitioner seeking to determine the volume of a tumor, and in particular a tumor of the prostate, has had to proceed with an empirical estimation of this volume by manually displacing a detection probe or "sound" connected to display means including a screen for forming images, with size being evaluated by observing the images formed on the screen. In other words, the practitioner has not had means available for automatically calculating or measuring the volume of a tumor.
An object of the present invention is thus to solve the novel technical problem consisting in providing a solution for automatically calculating or measuring the volume of a tumor or of a gland, in particular a tumor of the prostate or the gland constituted by the prostate, and to do this in a manner which is simple, easy to implement, cheap, and reliable.
Another object of the present invention is to solve the novel technical problem consisting in providing a solution for automatically calculating or measuring the volume of a tumor or a gland, in particular a tumor of the prostate or the gland constituted by the prostate, suitable for use with any type of detector probe, thus making it possible to make use of the detector probes that are already available to the practitioner.
Another object of the present invention is to solve the novel technical problems specified above in a manner which is particularly simple and reliable, by automatically displacing the probe, in particular stepwise, in rotation and/or in translation with synchronized acquisition of image or sections provided by the detector probe.
All of these technical problems are solved for the first time simultaneously and in a manner which is particularly simple by the present invention.